Notable Achievements
- Publications - Recent publications by department members
Awards
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Richard Orville Richard E. Orville has been selected by the Texas A&M University Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, to receive their Distinguished Scientist Award for 2008. Dr. Orville will receive the award at the annual banquet at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center on April 4. |
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Sarah Brooks
Sarah Brooks was honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed on
outstanding young scientists by the U.S. government, at a White House awards ceremony November 1, 2007. Dr. Brooks was nominated by the USDA (News Release)
in recognition of her work on assessing the impact of aerosols from
agricultural sources on air quality and climate change. Nominees have shown exceptional potential to shape the future through intellectual and innovative research at the frontier of science and technology. Links: College of Geosciences, TAMU |
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Gerald North
has been named as the 2008 recipient of the American Meteorological Society Jule G. Charney Award. The award is granted to individuals in recognition of highly significant research or development achievement in the atmospheric or hydrologic sciences. Dr. North is cited "for groundbreaking research on climate models, atmospheric statistics, and satellite mission development."
Gerald North served as chairman of the National Research Council Committee: "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years". The committee's report was requested by Congress in the late winter of 2006 and the report was concluded in June, 2006. The report is available from the National Academies Press. The committee concluded that the last thirty-year average was warmer than any comparable period over the last 400 years. Gerald North served on the AGU committee to revise the organization's statement on global warming in 2007. |
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Courtney Schumacher won the College of Geosciences Robert C. Runnels Excellence in Advising Award, 2007 |
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Craig Epifanio was the recipient of the 2007 Association of Former Students College Level Teaching Awards, College of Geosciences, Texas A&M University. |
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Don Collins was the recipient of the 2007 Dean's Distinguished Achievement Award for Faculty Research, College of Geosciences, Texas A&M University. |
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Richard Orville received the Outstanding Contribution to the Advance of Applied Meteorology by the American Meteorological Society, on February 1, 2007. |
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Bob Duce
was elected as one of the first 4 Fellows of The Oceanography Society.
Bob Duce is Co-Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee reviewing the US government Joint Subcommittee on Science and Technology's Ocean Science and Technology Plan for Ocean Research for the Next Decade. The report is being published by the NRC in September, 2007. |
| Andrew Dessler was one of 18 academic environmental scientists from the United States and Canada to be awarded a 2006 Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship. |
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Fuqing Zhang Fuqing Zhang shared the UCAR/NCAR 2007 Outstanding Publication Award
with his co-author, Chris Snyder, of NCAR's Mesoscale and Microscale
Meteorology Division. They were honored for their 2003 paper
"Assimilation of simulated Doppler radar observations with an ensemble
Kalman filter", which was published in Monthly Weather Review (Vol.
131, pp. 1663--1677). Their paper has stimulated several research
efforts applying the technique to observations, and it now serves as
the proof of concept for the use of the EnkF in assimilating radar data.
Fuqing Zhang was the recipient of the 2006 Dean's Distinguished Achievement Award for Faculty Research, College of Geosciences, Texas A&M University. |
Career Grants
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Sarah Brooks:
National Science Foundation Career Award, 2006 - 2011 Chemical Processing and Cloud Nucleation Activity of Soot Aerosol The goal of the work is to understand how soot aerosols react with oxidizing agents, such as ozone, the hydroxyl radical, and oxides of nitrogen. |
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Courtney Schumacher:
National Science Foundation Career Award, 2005 - 2010 Diabatic heating in the subtropics The goal of this research is to study the role of subtropical precipitating systems in the large-scale circulation using both observations and mesoscale and global circulation models. Courtney Schumacher: NASA New Investigator Award, 2006 - 2009 Interannual variations in tropical convection: The long-term TRMM Precipitation Radar data set The goal of this research is to analyze the interannual variability of convective systems in the tropics using NASA's TRMM Precipitation Radar. |
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Fuqing Zhang:
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2004 - 2009 Flow and Regime Dependent Mesoscale Predictability The ultimate goals of the proposed work are to estimate the predictability of mesoscale features embedded within different synoptic-scale flow regimes and to identify key physical processes that control the limit of predictability at the mesoscale through explicit simulations of idealized moist baroclinic waves and case studies of high-impact weather events. This was the only ONR YIP award to an atmospheric scientist in 2004. |
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Ping Yang:
National Science Foundation Career Award, 2003 – 2008 Investigation of the Scattering and Radiative Properties of Ice and Mixed-phase Clouds This project is focused on the study of the single-scattering and radiative transfer within ice and mixed-phase clouds from remote sensing and radiative forcing perspectives. |
Books
| Ken Bowman developed a new textbook, An Introduction to Programming with IDL, to teach basic computer programming methods to science and engineering students. The book was published by Academic Press. 2006. |
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| Andrew Dessler published a new textbook, The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate, with co-author Ted Parson, a Professor at the Univ. of Michigan Law School. The book was published by Cambridge University Press. 2006. |